bullshit
Jesus in my School - YouTube
Richard Sternberg
Summary
Expelled claims that Sternberg was “terrorized” and that “his life was nearly ruined” when, in 2004, as editor of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, he published a pro-intelligent design article by Stephen C. Meyer. However, there is no evidence of either terrorism or ruination. Before publishing the paper, Sternberg worked for the National Institutes of Health at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (GenBank) and was an unpaid Research Associate – not an employee – at the Smithsonian. He was the voluntary, unpaid editor of PBSW (small academic journals rarely pay editors), and had given notice of his resignation as editor six months before the Meyer article was published. After the Meyer incident, he remained an employee of NIH and his unpaid position at the Smithsonian was extended in 2006, although he has not shown up there in years. At no time was any aspect of his pay or working conditions at NIH affected. It is difficult to see how his life “was nearly ruined” when nothing serious happened to him. He was never even disciplined for legitimate violations of policy of PBSW or Smithsonian policy.
The Claim
“The paper ignited a firestorm of controversy merely because it suggested intelligent design might be able to explain how life began.” (Ben Stein, Expelled)
The Facts
Expelled doesn’t even get the paper’s subject right. The paper was not about how life began; it was about the Cambrian Explosion, which occurred about three billion years later. The greater error is claiming that the discussion of ID generated the controversy. There was an understandable outcry from members of the Biological Society of Washington over the embarrassing publication of what they recognized as poorly-written, inaccurate science in their journal. The argument presented in the Meyer paper had previously been reviewed and rejected by scientists. Seeing this shoddy science in their journal indeed “ignited a firestorm”, but not for the reasons given in Expelled. For more on why the paper was bad science, see the review published on the Panda’s Thumb blog and the review in the Palaeontological Society Newsletter.
Expelled Exposed: Why Expelled Flunks » Richard Sternberg
The cambrian explosion is definitely evidence against the theory of evolution. No Organism can survive that many mutations or DNA information change in that short in that short span.
It better supports a creation event where the diversity of life appeared suddenly. Low change over time did not happen with the cambrian explosion.
bullshit :I have heard creationists claim on multiple occasions that the Cambrian explosion disproves evolution. For example, Lee Strobel in this video claims that the all the phyla appeared at once, independently, and therefore they were created.
First we have to understand what the Cambrian explosion is. The Cambrian explosion occurred about 530 million years ago and lasted around 80 million years. (EDIT: Quasar brought to my attention that the exact length of time of the Cambrian explosion is under dispute. However, the lowest estimate is still around 5 million years.) During this time, many of the phyla or general body types first appeared for animals. Before the Cambrian explosion, very few fossils exist of multicellular creatures, and life appears to be mainly composed of single cell organisms.
However, not all phyla made their appearance during the Cambrian explosion. Land-based life such as flowers, ferns, etc... developed much later.
While fossils from the Cambrian explosion and Precambrian are rare, evidence exists that all these body types did not evolve completely independently. All animal phyla, for example, share many common characteristics. They are all triploblastic (the embryo forms in 3 layers), bilatteral (have left and right halves) coelomates (have internal body organs). Therefore, evidence of common ancestry is suggested in the formation of these early phyla groups.
More importantly, geologists found fossils predating the Cambrian explosion of burrows which require a digging mechanism and multicellular creatures. So the idea that creatures found in the Cambrian explosion arose without precedent is simply untrue. Life had been developing into more complex, multicellular forms in the Precambrian.
The easiest way to explain the Cambrian explosion is through the theory of punctuated equilibrium. According to the theory, the evolution of most sexually-reproducing creatures occurs in short bursts followed by long stretches of few changes.
While the theory of punctuated equilibrium may have been over-sold, the idea that changes to the environment spur evolutionary development is well understood by biologists. After all, the information for evolution comes from the environment - change the environment, change the creature.
It just so happens that the amount of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere dramatically rose during the time of the Cambrian explosion, giving animals more oxygen to work with. This extra oxygen could have enabled creatures to grow larger than ever before without suffocating their body parts due to a lack of oxygen.
So while much remains to be learned about the Cambrian explosion, the idea that it somehow proves that omnipotent deity magically created life on Earth is a very much unwarranted.
Debunked by Debunkey Monkey at 8:02 PM
The Debunkey Monkey: Debunking Cambrian Explosion Myths
btw my post was about the lies told in the film expelled, but as always you missed the point completely...and proved wrong.